Babygirl isn’t edgy, subversive, or empowering. It’s just sad.
Tired BDSM tropes disguise a played-out story of abuse
Babygirl promises a film about sexual fulfillment: a woman who has repressed her kinky desires her whole life finally sees her fantasies realized. As the film’s poster puts it: “This Christmas Get Exactly What You Want.” Critics have called it “an enjoyable liberation story” that “manipulate[s] our expectations” and stars Nicole Kidman as “a verbal power-bottom cougar.” I wish that were the movie I had seen.
But Babygirl isn’t edgy, subversive, or empowering. It’s just sad. Here’s what really happens: When a woman who repressed her kinky desires her whole life finally has the chance for sexual fulfillment, she ignores her better judgment and allows a man to use the trappings of BDSM to violate her — coercing her into a deeply unethical workplace relationship, leaning hard into rape culture, and leaving her just as powerless as she began. Sounds like a tragedy, no?
Any interesting questions about power are undercut by the film’s conflation of sexual power play and the real-life power imbalances between Romy, the CEO of a glossy robotics company, and Samuel, her day-one intern. BDSM dynamics often eroticize fantasies of unethical relationships, but outside the dynamic, participants are fundamentally equal — which a CEO and intern could never be. In this case, we get the typical corporate power structure flipped on its head: the CEO believes she holds the power because of her place in the company, but in fact it is the lowly intern who can ruin her career and life with a single phone call:
“You’re very young,” Romy tells Samuel. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Hurt me?” he replies. “I think I have power over you, not the other way around. I mean, one call and you lose everything. Right?”
His real-life power over her defines her role in their sexual relationship. The first time they break things off, Romy expresses her fear that Samuel will request to be transferred to a different department and people will start asking questions. But when they finally discuss consent (an hour or more into the film), he uses this against her:
“Both parties have to agree to [the dynamic],” Samuel tells her.
“And if I don’t?” she asks.
“Then I’ll go talk to someone.”
In other words, say yes or I will ruin you. That’s not consent; it’s extortion.
Sure, you might say, but Romy does go along with it all, even before Samuel threatens to expose her. When Samuel orders her a glass of milk at a bar, she drinks it. When he summons her to a hotel room, she appears. When he kisses her, she kisses back. But going too far down the logical path of “but she liked it” walks right into the province of rape culture, a place the film seems all too comfortable. When Romy arrives at the hotel that first night, she begins to lay down some expectations about their relationship: “We need to have a very serious conversation, you and I. We need to talk this through. Get to the bottom of it. You need to realize that what you’re doing is wrong — ” Instead of engaging her concerns, he puts his hand over her mouth and says, “I don’t think I want to talk.” Then he grabs the back of her head and pushes her face into the dirty carpet. He quickly stops himself…to victim blame. “Sorry, but I’m confused. […] You show up here, dressed like this, and you want me to just look at you and not do anything?” he asks. Ah, that old chestnut: in that dress, you’re asking for it.
Instead of claiming her desires, Romy equivocates. “I don’t know,” she tells him when he asks what she wants. Despite a lifetime of BDSM fantasies, she’s seemingly unaware of — or at least unable to articulate — her own desires. Luckily, she doesn’t have to know because Samuel can tell just by looking at her. “You sense things about what people want. What they need,” she tells him. She allows him to define her pleasure, and luckily he guesses right. Women don’t need to assert their desires; men can tell them what they like!
When she finally tells her husband what she’s into, she can barely get the words out. I have “thoughts of violence. Revolting thoughts,” she sputters. “I just want to be normal.” She blames her desires on her childhood (yawn) which she spent following gurus in communes (trained to blindly follow the instructions of a charismatic leader?) and undercuts the most foundational aspects of BDSM. It’s not about safewords or trust, she says. “There has to be a form of actual danger. Something needs to be at stake. For real.” She might as well be saying, Consent doesn’t do it for me; I need to be abused.
But then what about her power? That’s what the film is all about, right? Person in power secretly wants to submit (a tired trope of the BDSM genre). What about the dog?! The first time Romy sees Samuel, he’s rescuing her from a loose dog rampaging down the city street. From the start, the dog appears to be a parallel for her.
“How did you get that dog to calm down?” she asks Samuel in their first conversation.
“I gave it a cookie,” he says.
“Do you always have cookies on you?”
“Yeah. Why, do you want one?”
“No,” she replies curtly, but in their first hotel-room encounter, she crawls to him on all fours and eats candy out of his hand as he strokes her hair. At the end of the film, we see Samuel and the dog in that same hotel room, interspliced with a scene of Romy orgasming while her husband fucks her. The pet play scenes are some of the film’s hottest, but they don’t work on the metaphorical level. The dog is able to do extreme harm until Samuel tames it. While Romy may believe she has the same power, she never really demonstrates it. As the dog runs at her, she stands petrified, eyes wide, looking less like a muscle-bound attack dog and more like a trembling Chihuahua.
She has this same look when Samuel yells at her in the car when she attempts to break things off after arriving home to find him sitting at her breakfast table, socializing with her teenage daughters. She has this look when her husband yells at her about her transgressions and “pathetic, banal sexual fantasies.” She has this look when her assistant, Esme, another person she ostensibly has power over, shows up at her home to tell her the jig is up. If Romy wants to keep her position, Esme says, this is what she will do: “You will never see Samuel again. You will be a good leader, and you will create more opportunities for women within the company, and be a good example and role model to us all.” It’s to Esme’s credit that she doesn’t want money or an undue amount of power (aside from a promotion), but her morals could easily have gone another way. Would Romy have pushed back in that case, knowing that Esme, like Samuel, could ruin her with a phone call? It’s unlikely. The script reads: “Tears in Romy’s eyes. Ashamed, she nods her head. Esme leaves.”
Near the end of the film, we see Romy lying nearly catatonic on a couch (of her palatial second home, but moving on), having been kicked out of the house by her husband. She has put everything on the line for her desire, and has lost much of it. Her entire family suffers; her daughter comes to her in tears, begging her to return home. She is forced to send her lover to work for another company overseas. Romy ends the film where she began it: having unsatisfying sex with her husband and achieving orgasm only through fantasy. (Some might argue it’s her husband’s brief covering of her eyes that sends her over the edge, but it seems clear to me it’s the images of her lover and the dog that do the trick.) This is not an empowering story of sexual awakening. It’s a cautionary tale that stigmatizes BDSM and a woman’s sexual desire — a rape fantasy that ends with the sexual deviant getting her just desserts. If Romy had succeeded in ridding herself of these perversities, it seems, none of this would’ve happened.
The bar for sexual liberation and women’s empowerment must be on the floor if seeing a woman have the sex she likes is enough to discount the framing, fallout, and ethical blunders surrounding it. This movie lands on the side of abuse, no matter what the characters are into, and Romy’s lack of sexual fulfillment throughout her life is what allows this toxic relationship to happen.
